Hotel Schiefes Haus

Hotel Schiefes Haus is a house that has been tilting since the fifteenth century. Built in 1406 and enlarged in 1443, it stands where its south wall was set on soft ground and its north wall on firm gravel, so the whole structure has slowly sunk and turned for six hundred years. Engineers tried pillars, then stone walls, then concrete footings; none stopped the lean, and the first floor was even loaded with extra weight in an attempt to counterbalance it. Restoration in 1994 and 1995 reinforced the foundations, rebuilt the roof and ceiling structure, and shifted weight north, without erasing the tilt itself. The building is listed, has no lift and no air conditioning, and the wood used in the restoration went in without chemical treatment. There are eleven rooms across four floors, each named and furnished differently, from the Brückenzimmer on the first floor to Himmel near the top. Rooms on the south side, facing the Blau creek, keep the steepest floors; those on the north side sit comparatively level. A gallery built over the creek, once used for mooring boats and tying up wooden crates, now has a glass floor over the old fish basin. You can look straight down through it to the water below. The dining room seats up to 20, and a smaller lounge, the Berblinger room, doubles for breakfast and quiet evenings. It is a small hotel, and a strange one to walk through.